Trey R. Barker – Official Website and Blog

CopStories: A Little Sinus Medication

It was a simple traffic stop.

Not even my traffic stop, actually.  A local department had been first to see a car that had been skulking around a local ag place.  Supposedly someone had seen someone in that car with a red gas can.  The thought was they were stealing gas.  The local department, being close, made the traffic stop and waited for me.

I arrived, talked to the driver and passenger, and marveled at how hinked-up they were.  Nervous and fidgety, sweaty, lying through what was left of their teeth.  I absolutely believed those two were as deep in the bullshit as was possible to be.

But I had dick.  I could prove no crime.  I talked to them as long as I legally could, went back and forth again and again over their obviously bullshit stories, but had nothing.  So eventually I let them go.

Which bugged the shit outta me.

I had a rider that night, a woman who works in our civil department but who wants to get out on the road.  So she rides and learns what she can.  The stop bugged her, too.  We both stood there, watching the car drive away, and I’d bet good money that we both had our heads cocked like a dog seeing something it didn’t understand.

As we’re standing there, it occurred to me that we were on a straight line away from the ag plant.

So I backtracked.  Not looking for anything specifically, just seeing what there was to see.

While we were looking around a communications tower location, I said to my rider, “Ninety-nine times out of 100, there’s nothing to see.”

We’d stopped there because of the sheer amount of copper at those installations.  They constantly get hit by thieves.  I just wanted to make sure.  So we checked it and, as I’d predicted, found nothing.

But less than a ten of a mile up the road, we found some items in the ditch.

My gut said, ‘Dude, this is connected.  This goes with that car you just let go.’

I gloved both of us up so we could investigate and the first thing we found was a length of bicycle inner-tube, with a piece of PVC pipe on one end.  When I picked it up, my rider wrinkled her nose and commented about the smell.  I didn’t smell anything because my sinuses absolutely suck.

But even I noticed the damn thing was soaking wet.  My sniffer may not work all that well, but my eyes are still pretty good.  This tube was dripping wet.  So I put it down and turned my attention to the coolers.

I had her stand behind me, telling her it could be dangerous, pointed the top away from me, and began unscrewing.  My plan, which I thought a good one [at the time] was to slowly open the container, get the top off, and just get a light whiff to make sure it was anhydrous.  Once I’d confirmed it, then I’d get the official machinery moving.

Look, the problem is that the official machinery is fucking expensive and time consuming.  It’s a huge use of resources.  Fire departments, health departments, cops, ambulances, possibly haz-mat crews.  It’s no small undertaking so I wanted to be sure.

(As my rider pointed out, can you imagine if we’d called everyone out first?  Everyone’s moving and getting amped up ’cause they’ve got a call and teh cooler turns out to be full of…water?  Holy balls, Batman, they’d'a taken the cost of that call-out outta my paycheck until…like…2027!)

I have limited experience with meth labs.  I don’t try to be something I’m not, to know more than I know.  I try to do things as well as I know how, as well as I’ve been trained.  But I also try to draw from experience.  And my experience is that those containers only ever contain fumes, or maybe traces of residue.

Never have I had a container that had anhydrous still in it.

And I’ve damn sure never had one that was under pressure.

So I’m turning that lid…slowly…slowly…ever so slowly.

BOOM!

Fucking exploded off and I damn near shit myself.

In all the crazy shit I’ve done and seen as a copper, real fear doesn’t come along that often.  Usually training takes over and your time is spent playing that out.  Or you’ve seen scary stuff enough that it’s just not scary anymore.  You breathe your way through it, compartmentalize, sort it out, etc.

I was scared when I fought the PCP junkie for 14 minutes in an attempt to retrieve my gun.

And I was scared to death when that lid came off that cooler.

In seconds, snot had plugged everything.  My eyes were on fire and gushing tears as though someone had hooked up a damned water hose to the back of my head, my sinuses felt like a bomb had gone off deep in my head.  The upper part of my throat was burning.  I was spitting up a nasty chemical something.

For just a few seconds, I thought I was done for.  I thought I’d ingested the chemical, rather than getting doused with fumes.  It was that strong.  There was no way, I thought, this was simple fumes.

I checked my uniform and bare arms, looking for signs, while my rider asked – I think, some of this is a bit hazy – if I was okay.  I told her to call an ambulance and she laughed.

Because that is exactly the kind of joke I would make.  See, this was one of those moments when my carefree, fun-loving, constant jokes personality got me in trouble.

But when I looked at her, my face a complete mess, my breath hitching and heavy, her eyes got as big as planets.  She ran to the squad and got the ambulance and cops and fire and everyone else moving.  In other words, she called out the official machinery that I hadn’t wanted to call until I was sure.

Uh…yeah…standing there thinking I might be dead?  That was pretty much all the confirmation I needed.

But my rider had her own moment of hilarity amidst the chaos.  She ran to the squad car, yelling at me, “I don’t even know where the fuck we are!”

So I’m trying to tell her exactly where we are even as I’m slowly dying.  Tough to form words, much less thoughts, with a head full of anhydrous ammonia.

It wasn’t long before everyone was there, scurrying all over the scene and trying to figure out exactly what had happened.  The rest of the night – that I can tell you about right now, maybe more if and when there is a conclusion to what happened after I got out of the hospital – was a blur.

I do remember sitting in the ambulance [I had actually just refused transport to the hospital.  Either I thought I was okay enough to drive myself or I really thought I was a Man of Steel] and having my partner from the Academy calmly ask for my weapon.

“Ain’t giving you my gun,” I said.

“Yeah, you are…and you’re keys, too.”

“How the hell am I supposed to drive myself to the hospital if you have my keys?”

“Yeah, about that…sit down and shut up.”

Apparently it was decided, somewhere higher up the food chain than little ol’ me, that me and my rider were going to the hospital and doing it via ambulance.

And then my rider decided to give me grief.  “So, dude, what about that 99 times out of 10 thing?”

“Well…I don’t know…call this the one, I guess.”

But it was nice, comforting, to have so many people being anxious both for and about me; medics and cops, firemen, nurses, even reporters.  However, all of them took the opportunity to yell at me for opening the thing before grudgingly admitting they were mostly glad I wasn’t dead.

Yeah, you read that right.  They yelled at me first, then said the other.

Like an afterthought.

Thanks, guys.

Adventures in Hospital Land, Pt. 3: Dude, don’t say that!

A short update.

Went to my doc the other day.  He wanted to see how things were going twelve days hence.  Poked. Prodded.  Listened.  Laughed at what I’d said to the heart doc.

Then said, sort of out of nowhere, “I’m glad we did the stress test.”

“Uh…me, too?”

“Finding that blockage in your stent was a good catch.”

“Sure.”

“If we’d gone any longer, and if we’d had an event…I’m not sure you would have made it.”

Notice how it was ‘we’ up until the part where I die?

Of all the things I wanted the doctor to say, that was so not on the list.

The blockage had been minor, but it was in a stent and apparently that concerned him.  So he told me I could have died.

I love this doc, really I do.  He does not varnish anything.  When I had cancer, he didn’t really even tell me.  He started with who my oncologist was going to be.  I’m good with that.  Don’t screw around, don’t dip it in powdered sugar, just give it to me.

But this time?

“…not sure you would have made it.”

I coulda used some varnish.  Just a little.

Adventures in Hospital Land, Pt 2: It’s So Warm

And they’re pumping those fluids….

So there’s this tech: John.  Yacks and yacks and yacks.  No doubt trying to put me at ease.  Admirable enough goal, I guess, considering I’m about to get all kinds of medical crap jammed up my femoral and into my black little heart.  But, dude, shut the hell up.  Take your goatee’d face and zip it.  I’m fine drowning in my own self-induced mental drama.

He was nice enough, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t respond well to the standard pitch.  It was the same way at the police academy during my physical fitness test.  A pile of young pups started running with me, “You can do it,” “Keep working it,” and “We have faith in you.”

Yap yap freakin’ yap.  They got on my nerves so bad I actually slowed down…hoping they’d decide I had no chance and they’d leave me alone.  Eventually, they moved on to some other hapless recruit, I got back into my head, my comfort zone, and beat the required time by better than a minute.

So I dig the sentiment, but I prefer a little edge, such as the text I got before surgery from Officer Friendly: “I get first dibs on all your police gear.”

Now that’s motivation, baby!  Damn sure gonna survive…if for no other reason than to keep his grubby fingers off my stuff.

And still they’re pumping and pumping those damned fluids into me….

So John babbles babbles babbles.  He took me into the room, which was, just like during the heart attack, fucking polar cold, and he told me that when the doctor arrives, I needed to announce my name and birthdate in a loud voice.  It’s a security check to make sure they’ve got the correct patient.

We wait and wait and wait.  Finally the doc came in and I said, “Dude, you were supposed to be here an hour ago.”

The doctor’s support staff gasped.  The doctor, without missing a beat, said, “Damn cops.  Pulled me over.  One mile over the limit!  They’re never eating donuts when you want them to.”

Had I not been restrained and drugged, I would have laughed my ass off.  Obviously, this is the right doctor for me.

So Goatee John nudges me and I announce my name: “Johnny Rocket, here for an amputation, sir!”

“Shaddup,” the Doc says, and immediately gets to carving.

Pump pump pump, more and more fluids, endless fluids, an ocean’s worth of fluids…starting to be a problem….

“Trey,” John said, “Look over here.”

I half expected a magic show, maybe some wall puppets of a beating heart or something.  Instead, it was a giant screen TV.  But instead of, I don’t know, a Dirty Harry flick, it’s of what the doc is doing to me.

I thought: wow, that could be a torture device.  “If you don’t anzer de qvestions, ve vill do zis to you!”

But I’ve got a better idea for torture.

“Uh…John?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“So this fluid thing you guys are doing?  And the fact that it’s about ten fucking degrees in here?  Pretty quick, it’s going to be a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Getting a little floaty, John.”

“I – uh – sorry, I don’t get you.”

“In a very few minutes, I’m going to start raining a nice, warm, spring rain on everyone.”

He started at me a second, and then I saw a glimmer of understanding.  “Oh, no problem.  Hang on.”  He turned to the entire team.  “Doc, he’s got to piss, that all right?”

Here’s the thing.  I’d said it to him quietly to preserve some last shred of dignity, since everyone had already seen my junk and shaved around it and used a truly small piece of cloth to cover it (told you, it was reeeeeeaally cold in there).  So I didn’t really need him announcing to the team I needed to pee.

“Pee all you want,” the doctor fairly shouted, interrupting the completely unrecognizable song he’d been singing.

So John, confidante that he’d become, grabbed my manjack and moved it all around to get me set up in a urinal.  (Gotta tell ya: that’s an excruciatingly odd sensation, a guy helping you piss.)

And then?

Absolutely nothing.

A bit of performance anxiety.  Couldn’t squeeze a drop.

Lots of people watching, plus it’s just weird to be told to piss when you’re on your back and you have no idea where the hose is pointed.  Goes against every bit of toilet training and social reinforcement I’ve had for my entire life.

Nothing happens and nothing happens and now it’s starting to hurt and still I can’t get any action.

Still fluids are pumping, like a freakin’ pressure pump, blasting into me….

And so finally, after I’ve begun shaking from the need so badly that the doctor has actually put pressure on my bladder, I let go.

It explodes and I feel oh so much better.

And…somehow…warmer.

“John, dude,” I said.

“Oooops, sorry.  Didn’t get you lined up right.”

Are you kidding me with this?  This is exactly – exactly – what happened during the heart attack in February, 2001.  Pissed all over myself then, too.  Lots of fluids, an extremely cold room, that time a stainless steel table, and a tech who will probably never have kids because he has a problem getting the hose in the hole.

Either the team was really good with poker faces, or they didn’t care, or didn’t notice.  Exactly none of which helped my sense of humiliation.  John moved me around some, and the next time it was all in the cup.

What’s the Meat Loaf line?  One out of two ain’t bad?

That was about it for excitement.  The team murmured to themselves frequently, pulled some seriously long bits of equipment out of a nearby cabinet, did their thing, and then just stopped.

“That’s it, boy,” the doc said.  “We’re done.”

I raised my head, looked down the length of my body, and yelled, “Where the hell are my tits?  I came in for breast augmentation.”

“Best of luck with that, then,” Doc said as he left the room.

They took me to recovery, I fell asleep and, in fact, am sleeping still.

CopStories: Honestly…it ain’t my dope.

We get goofy calls all the time.  It’s the nature of the beast…and quite frequently, the beast is insane.

When I’d been at the Sheriff’s Office like twenty minutes or something, I answered the phone and got this:

“I need to report a robbery.”

“OmigoshhangonletmegetapenI’llgetallyourinformation.”

It was very exciting.  Not quite the first time I picked up the phone but close, and here was a guy reporting a robbery.

“When did it happen?”

He thought for a bit and said, “Well, I’ve been back six months.  Lived in Chicago for the better part of probably 18 years.”

I stopped writing.

Then, full of thoughtful analysis, he said, “I’m gonna say just about 19 years ago.  About twenty.”

Okay, well, first of all, turns out he wanted to report a residential burglary, not a robbery.  And second of all…well…it was twenty years ago.

That call didn’t last much longer.  To this day, though, I’m convinced it was a real call and not one of my new co-workers screwing with me…though that has happened on the odd occasion.

The point here is we get strange phone calls.

About a week ago, we get this:

“Yeah, I’ve got some dope.”

“Uh…okay,” the dispatcher said.  “And?”

“Well, you should come get it.”

A few minutes after this call, dispatch calls me.  “Uh…30?”

“Go ahead.”

“Can you respond to [blah blah blah address]?”

“Ten-four.  What’s the problem?”

“Uh…not really sure.  But apparently he’s got some dope.”

He chuckled and off I went.  I’ve gotten those calls before.  Usually, it’s someone who has partaken, along with a ‘friend,’ of said dope stash.  Then the ‘friend’ uses more than they’ve paid for and the owner of said stash calls in a huff and wants to file a complaint for theft.

And yes, there is a direct correlation between the amount of drugs you consume and whether or not you’re inclined to call the cops because someone stole your drugs.

So I get there and am quite surprised to see a local, fairly well-known mope.  Last time I saw him was last summer when I arrested him for battery.  The last time before that was when I arrested him for disorderly conduct.  Before that…battery and disorderly conduct.  Getting the picture?

“James,” I said.  “How’s it shaking?”

“I’ve got some dope.”

“Well, everybody needs something.”

Shaking his head, as though somehow I were the problem, he took me to a strip of land between his and his neighbor’s detached garages.  There was a little jungle in there, the kind of strip that always gets forgotten.  Weeds and old bags of garbage and rusty beer cans.  Sometimes an old license plate or a shirt tossed aside while painting the garage or something.

And sure as shit: dope.

Growing wild.  Illinois ditchweed.  With just a smidgen more than 0.0% THC.  Smoke up, baby!

This crap is everywhere and I say smoke as much as you freakin’ want.  You’ll spend three days puking your guts up.  But harvesting the herb will beautify drainage ditches all over the state so you’ll have done a good thing.

In James’ case, he had quite the nature preserve: eighteen or twenty plants.  The tallest was about 18″ high, while the smallest were less than 6″ tall, but the sheer amount surprised me.

“This ain’t mine.”

“You sure?”

He looked askance at me.  “Really?  You think I’m that stupid?  I’d plant a bunch of weed and then call you about it?”

I opened my mouth but chose instead not to speak.

“I got a kid now, Trey.  I can’t afford to have this shit around.”  His chest puffed a little.  “I’m grown up.”

This from a man in his late ’30s.

“A kid, huh?”

“Well, not mine biologically, but my girlfriend’s.  I call him mine.”

“Good for you, James, good for you.”

I was serious about that part.  James has always been a pain in the ass, but not particularly malicious.  His thing has always been getting drunk (with a quick spliff or two, but not much) and then picking a fight with someone.  And ten times out of ten, he chose the wrong person with whom to fight.  Ten times out of ten, he got his ass beat.  What I arrested was usually the left over, bloody mess.

So I started pulling the weed.  Who knew where it had come from.  Maybe the previous owner had planted it, though there were some plants growing out from between the concrete foundation of the garage and the driveway.  Maybe a bird ate up some seeds somewhere and crapped them out under the tree.  I took a Wal-Mart bag from James, dumped the plants in, and tossed the bag in my squad trunk.

“You know,” I said.  “I’m surprised you didn’t pull it, dry it, roll it, and smoke it.”

He nodded.  “I’m grown up.”

“Right.  I forgot.”

“Kiss my ass, Trey.”

Then he paused, winked at me, and said, “Dude, you want a beer?”

And suddenly all was right with the world.  That was my good old James, always good for a few beers and then a few arrests.

Adventures in Hospital Land, Pt. 1

So I had a stress test a few days ago.

I figure what the hell, it’s been ten years since the heart attack and it’s probably time to get in there and do some mopping, maybe a bit of window washing, some bush trimming…whatever.

Honestly, it’s something that’s bugged me (read: worried me) for a while and lately, when I exercise, there’s been a bit more chest pressure than normal.  The pressure’s always been there, like an annoying uncle who usually just quietly drinks his Thunderbird at family get-togethers.

Lately, though, crazy unc has been drinking more.  It hasn’t progressed to the ‘Wow, Uncle Slobodon’s grabbing that woman’s ass again.  He shouldn’t have his tongue in her ear, should he?  Does he even know her name?” stage, but I can see it coming.

The pressure, when I’m exercising, has been there since the heart attack.  Never pain, never anything scary, just a constant, gentle reminder than it’s probably not going to be a bad guy who kills me, or my wife, but rather the inexorable build of heart disease.

So I’m sitting with my Doc last week and I mention it, just to be on the safe side, and next thing I know, that son of a bitch has me hooked up to wheels and pulleys and bells and shit that you know – KNOW – is going to cost me the better part of half my annual salary.

I got a call from the hospital scheduler.  In a surprisingly nasal, and pissy tone of voice, she says, “We schedule them on Wednesdays.”

“That’s going to be tough,” I said.  “I work the night before and that night and it’s going to be tough.”

“Oh, well…in that case, let me explain something: we schedule them on Wednesdays.”

Ah, got it.  As flexible as the highway between Midland and Odessa.  Like Henry Ford famously said, any color you want as long as it’s black.

“You’ll need to be here at 7 a.m.”

“Yeah, but I don’t get off work until – ”

“You’ll need to be here at 7 a.m.”

There was a looooonng silence and in it, I heard – clearly – the threat of Nurse Ratched.

So of course I deferred to her.  Because I always do exactly what the authority types tell me.

But then she hit me up for money.  She demanded that I bring the entire co-pay…up front.

“Well, I’ll pay as much of it as I can.”

“You’ll need to have the entire co-pay.”

Now I’m getting pissed.  What she’s saying, without speaking, is that if I don’t have the entire co-pay, I’ll not be allowed to take the stress test.  In other words, the test is extremely important…unless I don’t have the money.

I mention that and it moves her not at all.  She couldn’t possibly give a crap.  She wanted her money and that was that, like a really militant street whore.  ‘I get mine or you don’t get yours.’

I have no problem paying the entire co-pay, and eventually I will, but this is an expensive damned test.  My part of the bill was something like $358,265.97 and she wanted it all right then.  Part of me, the really sassy part, wanted to march straight up to her the morning of and, with great flourish and flamboyance, write her a check for a million dollars.  A check that would, by the way, be just as worthless as one for $358,265.97.

The test itself wasn’t too bad.  I got there early, got my IV full of thalium or thumpium or something…coulda been thermin or all I know…hehehe, a little musical joke.  Then sat around for a half-hour while it coursed through my veins, no doubt radiating me like the water around Fukashima.  Then the tech took 15 minutes worth of pictures to see what my baseline circulation was.

A nurse shaved me – which wasn’t anywhere near as fun as I’d hoped! – and attached all kinds of freakin’ cyborg bullshit to me, then they put me on the treadmill and let fly.

And we flew at exactly 1.7 miles an hour.

Dude, come on.  My great-grandmother could walk faster than that and she’s been dead for a quarter-century.

Doc said he wanted my heart rate up to about 150.

“Doc?  This 1.7 crap ain’t gonna get it.”

“Yes, yes, it will,” he said.

“I don’t think so, babe, I do 4 miles an hour on a 5% grade at home.”

“Don’t you worry, I’ve done this a few times before.”

I shut up and just kept walking.  And walking.  And walking.  Slowly, the thing sped up, which I’d expected, and moved to a steeper grade, which I’d also expected.  After seven or eight hours – or maybe just 12 minutes – the thing stopped.

But it stopped at 4.2 miles an hour and on a nearly 20% grade.

Holy balls, my legs are still screaming.

When I was done, they gave me a towel for all my Manly Sweat, and then put me in some sort of SUV-sized chair and rolled me back to waiting so I could get a second set of pictures.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like being rolled around a hospital by two older woman in a giant SUV-chair.

I kind of dug it.  ‘Cause I’m a bad man.

Two days later Doc calls and says there are some abnormalities in the results but he’s not sure if that’s from the damage ten years ago or some new blockage.

So he casually mentions an angiogram.

He said it nicely, but it had the same undercurrent as, “We schedule them on Wednesdays.”

That, then, is the story of how I found myself talking to all manner of hospital registration people in preparation for Monday.

And what did she say to me?  This scheduler woman at a hospital an hour south of here?

“You’ll need to be here at 6 a.m.”

“Yeah, but…I can’t – ”

“You’ll need to be here at 6 a.m.”

Any color you want, baby, as long as it’s black.

CopStories: 120 Days

This is what I wrote May 6 -

“Do you see it?  Can you tell me what color the sky is?  I promise you she will bring that brand new baby into court with her.  I guarantee she will use it to keep him out of jail.”

It was a case of aggravated domestic battery, of assault with a deadly weapon, with some misdemeanors piled on top.  It had finally come to trial, more than a year after it happened and while I stood there, a giant bag of evidence containing the gun he put against her head and the knife he sliced her up with, victim and suspect came in together.

Yeah, it went downhill from there.

http://www.treyrbarker.com/2011/05/copstories-baby-mama/

Finally, six weeks after the bullshit non-trial, sentencing happened a few days ago.

And, as I and everyone else had predicted, the victim came to court waving the new baby around.  They pleaded with the judge that the batterer was the only one working, that he had two jobs including one as a wielder that he’d had for nearly a decade (though he substantiated neither job and his statement was at odds with his telling me he’d been unemployed for a while when I arrested him), that he was the glue holding the family together.

In other words, exactly what I wrote would happen.

But there was one tiny thing I didn’t see.

Another kid.

Just after getting out of jail, he apparently when to his other baby mama and got custody of his previous young daughter.  So when he was in court, in other words, he had two kids to wave around.

Because of the presiding judge, whose track record with cases in which I’m involved is less than brilliant, I expected the batterer to get a few years probation, some anger counseling, and fines.

When the judge came back after a short recess, he started talking.  And talked.  And talked.  While he’s an incredibly well-educated man, his bench speeches always remind me of the grown-ups in the ‘Peanuts’ cartoons.  In a previous case I had in front of him, he leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling, clasped his hands over his stomach with forefingers up like a church steeple, and explained that he wasn’t going to issue a ruling that day.  But after 30 minutes of convoluted logic, he issued a ruling.

In this case, he constantly harkened back to the batterer having two children to support and that made me a little crazy.  I could see him working his way into no jail time.

I don’t have much of a poker face and I kept expecting either the State’s Attorney or the court security officer to box my ears and tell me to calm the hell down.

But then the judge did something surprising.

He did the right thing.

The State’s Attorney had asked for the maximum of six months in the county cross-bar hotel.  The defense attorney had asked for zero jail time because of the jobs and children.

But the judge couldn’t square the circle.  He couldn’t figure out how the batterer was unemployed for a while, according to his arrest statement, but employed for nine years according to his court statement.

And he kept coming back to the gun and knife.

It perturbed the judge that the batterer had put a gun against the victim’s head.  It concerned him that the batterer had sliced open the victim’s belly and thigh.

So after 45 minutes, the judge sentenced the batterer to four months in jail.  And because it was a violent domestic, he’ll have to serve the entire four months.  There will be no good time.  Four solid months.

Plus a few years’ worth of probation and some sort of anger counseling.  And lots of fines and court costs.

Yeah, the victim will be there when he gets out and he absolutely will beat her again, I’ve no doubt.  But for four months, anyway, he’ll be locked away.  He won’t think about what he did, he won’t discover it was the wrong thing.  He won’t make amends or even believe he has to.

But he will be locked away for 120 days.

It’s retribution rather than rehabilitation and I definitely believe in rehabilitation.

But sometimes, with some people, there is no rehab, there is only raising their cost of doing business.

Two Branches Looking For A Match

A few months ago, journalist Jay Rosen wrote about James O’Keefe’s take down of NPR.

For those who don’t remember, O’Keefe (a cheap performance artist who’s sloppy editing somehow manages to fool everyone just long enough to create massive cheering from the right and hiding-under-the-bed-holding-their-balls-in-fear on the left) set up a ‘sting’ whereby he had people pose as potential NPR donors.  The donations were going to be dubiously large and from donors of whom no one had ever heard.

[As an aside, huge gifts from new people should be automatically suspect...and a simple Google search shows the donors to be bogus...hello...anybody out there?]

So O’Keefe sets up this sting and he manages to get an NPR fundraiser on tape trashing Republicans and wondering if NPR needs federal dollars.

[And another aside, federal dollars account for less than 2% of NPR's budget.  Fuck it, get it rid of that money.  Take that bullet out of the culture warriors' gun.]

Within a few days of O’Keefe’s hackery, the NPR board realized their balls had been stolen one night long ago and thus yipped and caterwauled and fired the CEO.  Rosen does an amazing job of laying out why that cowardice will actually hurt both the press generally and NPR specifically.  It’s a long piece, but well worth reading.

http://pressthink.org/2011/03/they-brought-a-tote-bag-to-a-knife-fight-the-resignation-of-nprs-ceo-vivian-schiller/#more-1022

Aside from explaining why firing the CEO was a disaster, Rosen also takes Andrew Breitbart, as notorious a liar and media manipulator as O’Keefe, to task for calling for the destruction of the “old media guard.”

As a former journalist, I believe in journalism.  I believe in plucky, independent journalism, the kind that was a service to citizens rather than politicians or celebrities.  Journalism that shone a light not only on the darkest corners of our society, but also the most boring corners of our society: school board meetings and zoning board meetings and county board meetings where endemic corruption is, sadly, more ineptitude than maliciousness.

That kind of pro-societal journalism is infrequent anymore.  Instead, we have what Breitbart calls “the old media guard.”

I say: burn the old guard down.  Brutally, violently, with much gnashing of teeth and yanking of hair…all said metaphorically.  I don’t want anyone getting physically hurt…even dumbasses like O’Keefe and Breitbart.

[And yes, I get that he's using the term significantly differently than I am.  My point here is that the phrase got me thinking.]

Anymore, Americans have a double-headed Hydra journalism serpent that does society few favors.

First, Americans get their ‘big’ news from a media elite in Washington.  It is a permanent community, though the asses in the chairs change every once in a while.  This community is built upon the White House reporters, the Pentagon reporters, those who participate in the Sunday morning shows, the political analysts who spend their days and nights appearing on all the news channels, frequently espousing completely contradictory positions within minutes simply be virtue of what network is giving them face time at that moment.

These media-wonks are desperate to keep their cushy beats and to protect their sources.  They have a fear, at least in my limited experience with Washington reporters, as well as Austin (TX) political reporters, that they’ll lose their access.  So they keep their sources happy by framing the questions exactly as those sources want.

Therefore, ‘torture’ becomes ‘harsh interrogation’ because we don’t want to offend the Bush administration.  David Kay, the leader of the Iraqi Survey Group, charged with finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, is cast as an idiot who can’t even find the country of Iraq, much less the weapons, because to believe his findings – which were that Iraq had no WMD – plays against the narrative the politicians of both stripes wanted at the time.  That narrative, you’ll remember, was that we had to go to war to keep the mushroom cloud from exploding over Washington.

[Which was ironic because just a few years later, as both sides became more and more frustrated with Washington, there were calls to level the nation's capital and be done with it.]

The second branch of non-journalism is Watergate.  This style of journalism is mostly practiced by people who came along after Watergate and were told Nixon’s resignation was the ultimate moment of journalism.  Most young journalists today want that moment for themselves.  They want to bring down a president.  Or, barring that, a governor or mayor or police chief or school executive.  And yes, it is partly the government’s fault we’re at this point.  After all, Watergate, Vietnam, the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, and how many smaller incidents, taught us to distrust the government.

The logical extension of that is the moment when a reporter has confirmation of some fact that a power broker continually denies.  When the reporter shoves that fact – be it video or pictures or crying witnesses – into the face of the power broker, it is a collective, journalistic orgasm.

And then the journalist, prodded and forced by the editor and publisher, moves on to the next gotcha moment.

Reporters are rarely given the time or space to offer context or understanding of the larger, underlying issues.

Now, I have no problem with shoving a fact in the face of a liar.  I believe in it whole-heartedly.  When I was a journalist, I wanted to catch the politicians in a lie or a scam or whatever.  But my wants were to make the system better, not necessarily to create a great resume to move on to the next market.  I am not holding myself up as some sort of Golden Angel of journalism, but I am saying that when the last editor I worked for told me straight up he was going after a politician because it would help him hop to the next, bigger-market newspaper, I was severely uncomfortable.

Those gotcha moments have to be done with maturity and explanation.  Don’t leave us with the gotcha and nothing else.  That way lies growing public distrust of journalists because all the public sees is the surprise moment.  Therefore, it becomes easy to believe that’s the only thing journalism is.  It becomes easy to ignore the media and anything they say, which means understanding of our world and society gets lost.  No one really understands the machinations that spin around us.

Those two ways of practicing journalism – cuddling sources for access or exploiting sources for a bigger market – are what need to be burned down.  Because as long as that’s how it’s done, the less people will trust journalists with anything.

Don’t believe me?  Then Google trust levels for journalists.  Last I checked?  It was lower than for politicians.

*****

To my reporter friends and former professors: before you burn my house down, I am not talking about you personally.  I’m talking about the institutional limitations, placed on you by editors and corporate overseers, under which you have to work.

The Family Jewels: He’s got a rock!

In about the 4^th grade, I developed an interest in family history.

I’m sure it came from ‘Roots,’ because that was the national rage then.  The white adults I knew were laughing about the character Chicken George and calling most blacks by that name, while the black adults I knew were talking about being empowered by Kunta Kinte (at least, that’s how I think I remember it from the viewpoint of more than 30 years later).

Anyway, I was smitten with the notion of figuring out who I am.  Some of that, I think, is because I didn’t know my biological father, or even my step-father to any great degree, and already knew my name was different than that with which I was born.   So I felt a little unmoored from life (and still do some days).

I tried to fill that hole with roots.

But my great grandmother beat me to it.  Mom told me about all the work she had done and it blew me away.  Understand, in my family, Grandma Parks is the platinum standard.  A teacher, an author, educated and intelligent, curious, hard-working.  She was the person everyone wanted to be; the pinnacle of what someone could be if they did the right thing and stayed intellectually hungry.

Plus, if I remember correctly, she assisted in her own birth, built the family’s one-room sod dug-out in the middle of the Kansas wastelands, walked all the local children miles to school, saved injured farmers with frontier medicine, eventually invented electronics, and graduated first in her class at Starfleet Academy (nod to Jimmy Fallon).

So she was a hep-chick.

Well, it also turns out that, after she retired (this would be the 60s, I think), sat on her front porch in Goddard, Kansas and wrote billions of letters in her quest to unearth her family line.  The information she discovered, from this front porch, was amazing.

Fast forward thirty-plus years and my wife is doing the same research.  She took my great-grandmother’s work as a starting point, traveled backward both paternally and maternally, and has gone slowly insane from the sheer volume.

But during her insanity, she’s found all kinds of cool bits and pieces about my family.  She was moaning about this the other day, about how ultimately cool my blood line is (which, you know, obviously skipped this generation…might have started up again with my brother, though).  She was carrying on about the cops and cop-killers, the Civil War soldiers, the Revolutionary War soldiers, the slave owners and tenant farmers, the losers and town selectmen, ministers, doctors, reprobates.

It’s been fun to watch her discover just how much of an American mutt I am (both sides of the family were here when the Bering Strait was still a land bridge!).  So I thought it would be fun to occasionally take a look at some of the more interesting bits.

Today a quick look at Robert Parke, my 10^th great grandfather.  Born in Suffolk, England in 1580 and hot-footed it to the New World on a brigantine called the Arabella in 1630, landing at Boston, along with 75 other passengers.  He was part of the massive migration of English Puritans (who are absolute dead-ringers for certain political groups today) that brought more than 10,000 people to New England in the 1630s.

Boston was founded in 1630 and Robert stayed there, no doubt partaking of the cool jazz and hot chicks that you know were just as much part of the city’s night life then as they are now, until 1640.

Good thing he stayed put, too.  That way, he managed to miss the Pequot Wars.  That particularly dirty war, between the settlers and the Pequot tribe, culminated in the Mysic Massacre, during which hundreds of Pequot men, women, and children were killed (between 500 and 700).  Less than five survived the carnage while a few more fled into the woods.  The English commander, Captain John Underhill, decreed that anyone trying to flee the flames should be automatically killed.

“Down fell men, women and children,” Underhill wrote in his journal.  “Great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that had never been in a war, to see so many souls lay gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places, that you could hardly pass along.”

William Bradford, the leader of the Plymouth Rock settlers, called Underhill a hero and gave thanks for the “sweet sacrifice” of natives “frying in the fire.”

Robert missed all that.  When he did leave town, he ventured far into the deep woods and began a life of starting a village and then moving and starting another.  He became, it appears, sort of the government’s Man Friday, running around getting things done.

In one village, I’m not sure which, he allowed his barn to be used for Sunday church services.  The call to worship – and remember these were pilgrims and puritans so you damn well went to church – was the beating of a drum.  The proclamation read: “For Mr. Parke’s barne, the Towne doe agree for the use of it until midsummer next to give him a day’s work a peace for a meeting house, to be by the Saboth come amoneth.”

Hard to tell from that phrase, which with I’m unfamiliar, what the payment was.  Sounds like he got a day’s work each from various townspeople.  That’s a sweet deal.  “Hey, you can use my smelly old barn, which reeks of manure from my cows and pigs and horses – oh, my! – and in exchange, I’ll use my official town selectman position to get lots and lots of labor from you guys!”

There is another interesting record from the General Court of Massachusetts  of May 30, 1644.  “That he (Robert Parke) may proceed in marriage with Alice Thompson without further publishment.”

When I first read that, I thought it said ‘punishment’ and I got all lathered up to know what this Pilgrim brother was doing with his chicks that would lead to punishment.  Then again, knowing that we’re talking about hardcore puritans, it might have been as innocuous as saying “Hellooooo…how you doin’?”

Ultimately, in 1930, his descendants put a plaque on a rock.  It lists the various things he did and offices he held.  A copper plaque jammed right into the face of a big rock.

It’s pretty cool.  As far as I know, no one else in my family has an engraved rock.  I mean, I spray painted my name on a garbage can once, but that’s hardly the same thing.

His is nobleman carving civilization out of something new.  Mine’s really more sort of…loser going to jail.

Eh..wha’choo gonna do?

What Dreams May Come

So my dreams have been excruciatingly odd lately.  The last few months, anyway.

But really in the last handful of weeks.  Full of violence and that strange all-encompassing melancholy you find in dreams (which always manifests, for me, with the knowledge that I’m dreaming and that it’s bad but with an inability to get myself out of it).

Two nights ago, I’m back in Denver, at Montview Avenue and Monaco Parkway.  Monaco is a street with a giant, almost park-like median in between the two roadways.  Lush with trees and modest homes set back off the road.  Take it north and you  hit Interestate 70 after a few blocks.  South and you’ll get to the longest commercial road in America: Colfax.

(I prefer to think of Colfax as the Avenue of Strumpets.  Quite the portable-sex asphalt jungle is it.)

Anyway, I’m in uniform but I’m a good quarter mile from my squad car.  Something happens – one of those vague things in dreams that gives you a feeling, but not an incident.  This feeling was adrenaline.  Pure “balls-to-the-wall-man” (ah…I love when I can get in an 80′s German-metal band reference) adrenaline.

Because I hear gunfire.  Then the car speeds away, hammering down Colfax Avenue.

I run to my squad, jump in, and fire that bastard up.  I’m flying after them but it’s not like the car chase in ‘Bullitt.’  This is fuzzy.  It’s amorphic.  In fact, I don’t even see the chase.

It’s one of those dream sequences where I just know what’s happening.  I know I’m catching him, though I see nothing.  I know we’re shooting at each other, that bullets are tearing our cars apart, though I see nothing.

Most importantly: I know I’m going to catch him.  There is zero chance he’ll get away from me.  Sadly, before I can  actually put the habeas grabbus on him, I wake up.

There is no trick ending here.  I actually am going to catch him and that makes it a great dream.  He’s the bad guy, after all.

However, last night….

I’m a mid-level lackey in a mob-style family and I am getting absolutely yelled at by the don.  Straight up vicious, man.  Not only is everything I’ve done for him wrong, it’s monstrously wrong.  So this fucker is yelling and yelling and every time I try to defend or explain myself, he slaps me.

I do not hit back.  I do not step out of the way.  I do not dodge the blows.

Instead, I learn the lesson.  Don’t talk back and you won’t get hit.  Everything becomes ‘yes, sir,’ and ‘no, sir.’

It doesn’t work.

Instead, it drives the don completely insane.  He immediately begins punching me.

Then knifing me.

And finally he shoots me.

Bad, right?  Sure.  Getting shot in the head can be a problem.

The larger problem is that the dream never ended.

After getting shot, I woke up.  A little freaked out, but thinking: wow, at least it’s over.  Now I can sleep.

Yet as soon as I slipped away again, it started again: same sequence, same punishment, same inability to figure out how to defend myself.

Ultimately, I woke up four or five times, each time after the head shot.  After four hours, I gave up.  It was pointless to sleep.  With that crap slipping around every corner, there was no where to go.

I climbed out of bed angry.  Seriously angry.  Not at losing sleep, it was Saturday and I had no agenda for the day so who cares, but because what I took from the dream was that there was no way to stand up for myself; that everything led to some kind of violence against me (not in a martyr-complex sort of way, but in a ‘What the hell kind of situation is this?’ sort of way).

Yes, I was angry that this asshole wouldn’t shut up long enough for me to explain, or didn’t make sense enough for me to follow his perverse and twisted logic.  But mostly I was I was angry that I couldn’t figure out how to defend myself.  I should have been smarter than this man who couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him.

Big deal, right?  Just a dream, right?

Hardly.  It colored most of my Saturday.  I couldn’t quite find a good groove, couldn’t get my head up to speed.  I damn sure couldn’t let go of the overwhelming sadness the dream shot through me.

So, later, exhausted from dying all night, I napped.

And dreamt.

I was at a skanky old blues club.  Dirty and dingy and filled with questionable folk.  Exactly the kind of place I love.  Great food, cheap beer and cheaper whiskey, great music sung by dented and broken people.

This random guy accosts me, spews attitude, gases me with profane verbiage.

So, cop that I am, I shot him.

And no one in the joint had problem one with it.  In fact, no one seemed to notice.

Then I left and headed for some kind of pick up point.  Not sure, now that I’m awake, exactly what it was, but I had that magical dream knowledge that that was where I needed to be next.

So I’m walking to that place, suddenly carrying my uniform because it’s soaking wet and covered in sand…which makes it incredibly heavy.  I’ve got my duty belt draped across my other arm, along with pistols and shotguns…and…chains.

Yeah, seriously.  Have no clue where the chains came from…but it sure as shit seems like they should mean something, huh?

So I walk and walk.  Then walk some more.  And when I’m done with that, I walk even more.  Carrying all this shit.  Getting heavier and heavier.

And still I walk.

And I never get there.

So even though I’ve done a good thing, and taken care of the bad guy (which I think is related to a current case I can’t tell you about yet…and no, I didn’t actually shoot anyone), I can’t get to where to go.

Sort of a copped-up version of running endlessly for that door, I guess.

So that’s it…for now.  I’m not sure why my dreams have gotten so bizarre lately, though I have an idea or two.  I’m not sure what, if anything I can do about them (without winning the lottery and changing everything) but they’ve been interesting to watch.

At the same time, though?  Enough.

I’m tired.

Lemme sleep.

Bow…and bow…and bow again. Maybe I’ll Notice

Sixty-two percent.

I’ve had two literary agents in my career.

The first was straight up flim-flam.  He was looking for a quick sale and when it didn’t happen dumped me quicker than a guy tearing open a box of Trojans for whoever he was going to screw next.

The second was just a few years ago.  Though his heart was in the right place, he didn’t have the right contacts to get my writing where it needed to be.

Sixty-two percent.

So to find a new one, I went back to basics and worked the shoe leather, metaphorically speaking.  Queries, queries, and still more effing queries.  Focused queries to agents who rep writers I love, agents who repped odd books that echoed what I do, agents who rep friends of mine, agents who’ve contacted me based on friends of mine being their clients, who I’ve had drinks with and been on panels with, etc., etc., etc.

And?

Sixty-two percent of those agents said, “Fuck off.”

Wait, that’s not right.  Because to tell me something, you have to respond.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, sixty-two percent of the agents I’ve contacted haven’t bothered to respond.

They’re busy, don’cha know.  Too busy, in fact, to even post on their website they’re too busy.

Some, to their slight credit, tell writers up front they’re too busy to respond and I’m not talking about them.  They explain their rules and a writer either abides or hits the pavement.

Hmmmm…can we all spell a-r-r-o-g-a-n-t sons-of-bi….

See, to get to a traditional publisher, a writer must have an agent.  Most traditional publishers don’t even bother with books that have no agent.  Thus the agents become the gatekeepers of almost everything literary.

Now, I understand that all decent agents are swamped with submissions.  Everyone with a computer knows they are the next Hemingway or Updike or (God, how many times have I heard this) the next Stephen King.

Bullshit.

After having taught writing for years, I’ll wager that less than one in a thousand ‘writers’ has spent a second learning how to write.  They don’t bother honing their ‘craft’ to anything other than a dull nub.  Then they take that dull nub, write a novel, and send it every agent in the world.  So I understand that most agents are drowning in submissions.

So what?  You wanted to be an agent.  Fucking deal with it or get another job.

I wanted to be a cop to investigate murder and cold cases and kidnappings and help people seriously in need.  My reality?  Unlocking vehicles for idiots and handling calls from Mama who says her 14-year old daughter is disrespecting her.

If I don’t like it, I can work somewhere else.

Ditto agents.

They get thousands of submissions, that’s their world.  Deal with it or get another damned job.

Instead, they ignore the writers, in essence saying: My time is incredibly valuable so you need to jump through my myriad submission hoops.  OTOH, your time is worth dick so I don’t care how much time you spend jumping those hoops, I’m going to pretend you don’t exist.

Look, most agents accept, and many require, email submissions.  So how do you tell someone you can’t respond when you’re reading their submission from their email?

Seriously…how long does it take to hit ‘reply,’ type “Thanks, but not quite for me,” and hit ‘send?’

Instead, what many agents post on their websites is that if the writer hasn’t heard from them in three weeks or six weeks or whatever, the writer can assume the agent has passed on the project.

What the fuck is that?

What they’re saying, again, is that their time is incredibly valuable and the writer’s time is crap.  They don’t care if you have to troll your database, checking what date you sent them the query, then comparing that to the calendar to see if it’s still under consideration or they’ve passed.

That’s easier for them that taking a full five seconds to reply and tell you they’ve passed.

Don’t believe this kind of bullshit happens?  Here’s one I got a few weeks ago:

“Dear Author,

Thank you for your submission, which we look forward to reading.  Please note that, due to the extremely high number of queries which we receive, we will only respond if we are interested.”

Seems to me that if you’ve been swamped with that many submissions, maybe you should stop taking submissions for a little while.  Magazines close to submissions all the time, or have limited submission windows, and everyone is cool with it.

So why not agents?

Come on, they stay open to submissions, even if they don’t actually have time for them, in case that one in a million book comes along that makes them bazillions of dollars.  In other words, we’re so busy that we can’t answer any writers, but not so busy that we can’t look at just one more book…it might be the big one!

This is my current fav:

“Thank you for your submission to [agency].

Due to the volume of submissions we receive, we may not be able to respond to every query.

We will contact you directly if we are interested in talking further about your work.  We kindly request that you do not call to follow up on your submission.  Please understand that this only takes away from our ability to review your queries in a timely manner.”

No ‘Dear Author’ or ‘Thank you,’ which is just rude and pissy (especially in an automated response that’s already written).  They tell me they’re too busy for me, then demand – though it’s couched in ‘kindly request’ – that I do nothing to check the status of my project.  Then they explain to me, as one explains something to a third grader, why checking in is a bad thing.

Understand this: my rant has nothing to do with being passed over by agents.  It happens.  Fine.  Sometimes a writer is up, sometimes a writer is down.  It’s not about not getting picked for the team, it’s about trying out for the team and never hearing back from the coach.  If you want to pass me over, fine, just let me know.

It’s about the rudeness and arrogance and self-involvement of expecting someone to bow to your every demand, and refusing to acknowledge that they even bowed.  It is a truly shitty way of doing business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand this is how business is now done.  There ain’t thing one I can do about it except bitch and rant and stop submitting.

Or I can get to writing the next novel.  ‘Cause I found this agent and I’ll bet you a million-dollar contract she loves it.  Her website says she doesn’t respond unless she’s interested, but I know she’ll love this.  I’ll be waiting for my email to chime and say, “Incoming Message”….